Having decided I wanted to make a less dense cake than my usual, I spent some time looking into sponge cake recipes. But sponge cake/angel food cake has always been a little too light for my liking. So I decided to try out a Victoria Sponge cake instead, because at least it has butter in’t. And also because it’s the simplest formula imaginable: equal ratios (by weight) of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs.

Then, having decided I wanted to try out an Aztec/Mayan/Spicy chocolate cake, I decided to make a spicy chocolate Victoria Sponge.

And then, since I wanted to be able to sample this concoction before foisting it off on anyone else, I decided to make cupcakes rather than cake-cakes.

And Then, since I still had egg yolks left-over from the last baking project, I decided on a white chocolate “french buttercream”* (sprinkled with cinnamon) to go on top.

And then…

I used two tsps of cinnamon and 1/2 tsp of cayenne. The cayenne definitely creates a tickle in the back of the throat. I wasn’t sure how that would go over, but I took the cupcakes into work and even the fellow who doesn’t like icing ate his all up.

Cupcake recipe

Measure out wet ingredients:

– 220 grams of butter
– 220 grams of sugar

Cream these together. Then add:

– 4 eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition
– 2 tsp of vanilla.

– Once the syrup reaches 236 degrees, pour the syrup into the egg yolks in a constant stream, beating until the mixture is “light, fluffy, lemon-colored, tepid.” (This is where an extra pair of hands comes in handy if you’re using a hand mixer.)

– Mix in 2-1/2 sticks (10 oz) of softened butter, in portions.

– Mix in 6 oz of cooled melted chocolate (white, milk, or semisweet)

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* I put this in quotes because the recipe seems to be a modification of a french buttercream, rather than a pure version. Rather than creating a simple syrup and boiling it to soft ball stage, it calls for corn syrup boiled to soft ball stage. (The author of the book guessed this might have been the frosting creator’s way of Americanizing a recipe that calls for glucose syrup, which is/was commonly used in French pastry kitchens but not so easily found in American supermarkets.)